Cheers & Jeers

Treasures that washed ashore this week; flotsam we hope the next tide carries away:

Treasures that washed ashore this week; flotsam we hope the next tide carries away:

A PR disaster

The management of the Ocean Edge resort in Brewster, wherever it may be, must have a tin ear. It wants to be a good neighbor, but then it sticks a thumb in the public eye: the effort to forbid the public from using almost a third of a mile of tidal flat on which people have wandered and sat and played forever. As if there's not enough space out in that vast flat for all the Ocean Edge patrons and everybody else, too.

Come on, Ocean Edge: Take down those no trespassing signs.

Sex offender loophole

Our sister paper over in New Bedford, the Standard-Times, reported Saturday that 33 sex offenders in the city don't have to report to police because they are appealing their sex-offender status.

Once released from prison, the state classifies their status — Levels 1, 2 or 3 in ascending order of seriousness — but some of the most serious offenders often have weeks, or months, without police supervision. The appeals process creates a gap during which an offender is free and without supervision. Lawmakers are searching for a way to close this legal loophole, but they need to move quickly.

In January, police arrested a man accused of raping a 6-year-old boy in the New Bedford library. The suspect, Cory Deen Saunders, had been in the city for five months before he was required to let police know he was there.

A knight errant

Zimbabwe's aged and uncomprehending dictator, Robert Mugabe, was stripped of his honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II this week. It was the least Great Britain could do in the face of human rights abuses that have shocked the civilized world. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Britain will not recognize the outcome in its former colony's election today, since Mugabe's thugs killed, beat and intimidated the opposition party until it quit. The knighthood was bestowed in 1994 when Mugabe still had some international credibility as an anti-colonial hero.

Everglades miracle

In one fell swoop, the shrinking, polluted Florida Everglades was promised a reviving gulp of fresh water this week. Environmentalists, after decades of tinkering around the edges, are ecstatic that U.S. Sugar Corp. has agreed to sell the corporation's 300 square miles of cane and citrus to the state over the next decade.

The farm — larger than Pinellas County — lies between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades and is considered the heart of the 'glades ecosystem. The $1.75 billion deal will end farming in six years and allow natural flow of fresh water to the ailing marsh system. Republican Gov. Charlie Crist called the deal "as monumental as the creation of our nation's first national park, Yellowstone."

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